Black and pale ink snakes coil together on a forearm above the words don't panic in script, in a blackwork and dotwork style.

Intertwined snakes and script on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Several snakes are wound together in a central motif, with the darker snakes filled with dotted and patterned detail and the paler snakes drawn as light outlines with fine crosshatched scales. The shading is limited to black ink and the pale highlights, which show as cream against the skin, giving a graphic, woven effect. The motif sits on the forearm with the script words don't panic written above it.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Snake Script Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, you, where the lamp catches your face. Not that bench, the boards have gone soft in the middle. Now. You want the knot, don't you? Everybody wants the knot.

Keep reading

Hollis Brothers' Travelling Circus had run its last winter season in a Lincolnshire field, and the snake tent was the only thing still paying its way. Old Sable Marr kept six of them: four dark ones, freckled with spots like a sweet-shop tin, and two pale ones the colour of cold custard, drawn so fine under the lamps you could see the ribs of their scales. Sable never let them touch. Touching made them nervous, she said, and nervous snakes bit the wrong people.

Then came the night the generator failed, the crowd was twenty souls and a dog, and young Ferris Hollis dropped the lid of the basket. Snakes poured out across the sawdust like spilt ink. The pale pair went for the dark ones, the dark ones for the pale, and in ten seconds the lot of them were wound round the centre pole in a grip no hand could pick apart. Ferris went white. Somebody screamed. Sable only shuffled over with her stick and a paper cup of warm milk.

"Don't panic," she said, the way she'd said it a thousand times. "They're not fighting. They're only sorting out who sits where." She set the milk down, sat on an upturned crate, and waited. By morning the knot had loosened on its own, one slack coil at a time, and the pale snakes slid away cool and unhurried into the straw. Ferris swears the lot of them were smiling. I swear nothing of the kind. Now go on home before your mother comes looking.